After meeting with Dallas’ parents, Jim and Anna Egbert, at their home in Dayton, Ohio, he took the job.ĭear quickly formed a picture of Dallas as a profoundly troubled, lonely young man. But there was something about Dallas that drew him in, mainly the student’s young age Dear himself had an 11-year-old son. Having just returned from solving an extortion case in Tokyo, Dear was reluctant to take the case on. Could it be a map, the campus cops wondered? Why were several pins configured into the rough shape of a pistol? In his dorm room he’d left a short but troubling note: “To whom it may concern: should my body be found, I wish it to be cremated.” On his cork board he’d created an arcane arrangement of pushpins. Small-boned and looking much younger than his age, Egbert – known as Dallas – was a precocious high-achiever with a high IQ who was already a sophomore at the college, majoring in computer science. “My nephew has disappeared,” Gross told Dear.Ī week earlier, 16-year-old James Dallas Egbert III had vanished from the campus of Michigan State University.
On August 22nd 1979, in Dallas, Texas, private detective William Dear received a call from a locally well-known surgeon named Dr. Mazes and Monsters was Tom Hanks' first major role, at the age of 26. Its own story is a narrative labyrinth, whose sharp twists and strange turns begin with real-life tragedy and end with a widespread media scare that was so intense it made the creators of D&D fear for their own safety.Ĭontent warning: this article includes discussion of suicide and depression. But Mazes and Monsters is far more than an embarrassing ‘before they were famous’ curio. The film is trashy, schmaltzy and so forgettable that Hanks himself has barely referred to it since. In the Canadian made-for-TV movie, the 26-year-old Hanks landed his first-ever leading role as freshman college student Robbie Wheeling, who becomes psychologically unhinged by a fictional, Dungeons & Dragons-like roleplaying game. Before Forrest Gump, before Turner & Hooch, before Bachelor Party even, there was 1982’s Mazes and Monsters. For Tom Hanks, it was hardly the most auspicious start to a movie career.
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